decoration decoration
Stories

GROKLAW
When you want to know more...
decoration
For layout only
Home
Archives
Site Map
Search
About Groklaw
Awards
Legal Research
Timelines
ApplevSamsung
ApplevSamsung p.2
ArchiveExplorer
Autozone
Bilski
Cases
Cast: Lawyers
Comes v. MS
Contracts/Documents
Courts
DRM
Gordon v MS
GPL
Grokdoc
HTML How To
IPI v RH
IV v. Google
Legal Docs
Lodsys
MS Litigations
MSvB&N
News Picks
Novell v. MS
Novell-MS Deal
ODF/OOXML
OOXML Appeals
OraclevGoogle
Patents
ProjectMonterey
Psystar
Quote Database
Red Hat v SCO
Salus Book
SCEA v Hotz
SCO Appeals
SCO Bankruptcy
SCO Financials
SCO Overview
SCO v IBM
SCO v Novell
SCO:Soup2Nuts
SCOsource
Sean Daly
Software Patents
Switch to Linux
Transcripts
Unix Books

Gear

Groklaw Gear

Click here to send an email to the editor of this weblog.


You won't find me on Facebook


Donate

Donate Paypal


No Legal Advice

The information on Groklaw is not intended to constitute legal advice. While Mark is a lawyer and he has asked other lawyers and law students to contribute articles, all of these articles are offered to help educate, not to provide specific legal advice. They are not your lawyers.

Here's Groklaw's comments policy.


What's New

STORIES
No new stories

COMMENTS last 48 hrs
No new comments


Sponsors

Hosting:
hosted by ibiblio

On servers donated to ibiblio by AMD.

Webmaster
More to software | 354 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
Still just algorithms
Authored by: jesse on Sunday, November 25 2012 @ 12:06 AM EST
The field of mathematics you are using is Numerical Analysis.

It is the field of developing algorithms for efficiently computing results...

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

More to software
Authored by: Wol on Sunday, November 25 2012 @ 04:06 AM EST
Or more to programming.

This entire post confuses the act of DOing with the act of BEing. Yes
program*ming* is a lot more than maths. But the program that comes out at the
end is *just* maths.

It's like writing a novel. You can't copyright the *act* of writing. But you can
copyright the *result* of writing. The *act* of programming is not maths. But
the *result* IS.

Cheers,
Wol

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

"extreme position" ?
Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, November 25 2012 @ 10:43 AM EST
Its not "extreme", and its also not a matter of opinion: its an objective fact about how computers work. Software is nothing but data which is fed to a universal algorithm (usually, the instruction cycle of your CPU). It contains many other algorithms too, but ALL software is just data which expresses the form of a computation. Thats what the "soft" in "software" means: this form is expressed as changeable data, rather than expressing it as "hardware" with physical mechanisms that perform the specific computation. A general purpose CPU is capable of performing any computation which can be performed, if someone writes down the proper description of it (input data for the CPU, aka "software").

Its just like saying a skilled musician can play any music on their guitar, and the "software" is sheet music. Deserves copyright? Yes. Is creative, expressive. Deserves patents? Of course not. Absurd, dangerous. For society, useless and expensive.

"Software" is entirely algorithmic and entirely mathematical, and allowing patents to cover it has been entirely a disaster.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Groklaw © Copyright 2003-2013 Pamela Jones.
All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners.
Comments are owned by the individual posters.

PJ's articles are licensed under a Creative Commons License. ( Details )